eDiscovery has become more important with many companies which are dealing with litigation. Courts can require companies to search and discover evidence within electronic documents. So in that case It is company’s responsibility to put these documents on “hold”. “Holding” a document can lock the document in place, preventing it from being edited, moved, deleted, or checked out (Read previous post of this series). The document can also be copied to an authorized document or record center.
You can manually add items to hold on any site collection, which is great. But that doesn’t help you find the content you don’t already know about. What if you have a large amount of items you want to find and add to a hold? For that you can use the features on the Discover and hold content page, which is a settings page in Site Settings. From this page you can specify a search query and then preview the results. The configured search service (SharePoint Search Server or FAST Search for SharePoint) will automatically be used. You can then select the option to keep items on hold in place so they cannot be edited or deleted, or if you have configured a Content Organizer Send to location in Central Administration you can have content copied to another site and placed on hold. You may want to create a separate records center site for a particular hold to store all content related to that hold. The Content Organizer is a new SharePoint Server 2010 feature based on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Document Router with richer functionality to automatically classify content based on Content Type or metadata properties. Look for a future blog post covering the Content Organizer.
Holding content in place is recommended if you want to leave content in the location is was created with all the rich context that SharePoint provides, while blocking deletion and editing of content. Be aware that this will prevent users from modifying items. If you prefer users to continue editing documents, then use the copy to another location approach.
When searching and processing, the search will by default be scoped to the entire Site Collection and run with elevated permissions so all content can be discovered. The search can be scoped to specific sites and you can also preview search results before adding the results to a hold. Items can be placed on multiple holds and compliance details will show all of the holds that are applied to an item.
This post has shown how to create a useful Hold and eDiscovery search. The Advanced Search Web Part is a great tool to create complex keyword searches without having to know the syntax. The actual search then can be viewed or edited easily using the familiar Text Editor used through out SharePoint. The Hold and eDiscovery process is an important process in an ECM system.
Hope this helps !!!!!
Kirti Prajapati 